Doubt and Identity in Romantic Poetry by Andrew M. Cooper (review)

Book Reviews89 (360). This essay should be part of any reading list on women's issues, especially those concerning European women. It can also serve as a theoretical framework for reading Propriété privée, one of Constant's fictional works. GINETTE ADAMSON Wichita State University ANDREW M. COOPER. Doubt and Identity in Romantic Poetry. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. 233 p. As a somewhat belated reaction to M. H. Abrams' Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (1971), the last decade or so has found forms ofradical self-consciousness as the center ofRomantic theory and criticism, called often by such names as irony, skepticism, indeterminacy, paradox, doubt, and reflexivity. The reassessment of Abrams' portrayal of positive idealism and progressive secularization in Romantic literature took place in a spate of studies: Peter Conrad's Shandyism: The Character of Romantic Irony (1978), Michael G. Cooke's Acts ofInclusion: Studies Bearing on an Elemental Theory of Romanticism (1979), David Simpson's Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (1979), Anne K. Mellor's English Romantic Irony (1980), Tilottama Rajan's Dark Interpreter: The Discourse ofRomanticism, and more recently Cynthia Chase's Decomposing Figures: Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition (1986), and Charles J. Rzepka's The Selfas Mind: Vision and Identity in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats (1986). Andrew M. Cooper joins this rather admirable group. Doubt and Identity is premised on an application of reader-response theory and critique of Humean philosophy. Most of the book is taken up with close readings of Romantic poems to show how they inevitably reflect the reader's own desire to be known. Thus it is claimed that the reader's epiphany is necessarily the poem's climax. Cooper acknowledges that all poems can be said to correspond with this allegory of reading, but he says that this characteristic ofreciprocity is especially prevalent in Romantic narrative poems: "... in these poems we are aware of [the author] only as a confused presence whose identity is not preestablished but emerges in symbiosis with our own progressive journey through the narrative" (6). The poems central to Cooper's thesis are Blake's Milton and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Coleridge's "Christabel," Byron's Don Juan (especially Canto II), and Shelley's Alastor. Cooper describes the narrative structure of these poems as both reflexive and spiralling, "whereby they turn back upon themselves on levels ofincreasing self-consciousness" (185). The Poet, narrator, and reader of Shelley's Alastor thus become indistinguishable in the poem's movement toward darkness, death, and the possibility of knowledge; the poem enacts a movement from idealism (the possibility ofa quest with a formulated end) to skepticism (mistaking the self as separable from the other) so that the poem collapses into a discourse ofskeptical idealism. Likewise the narrator 90Rocky Mountain Review of Coleridge's "Christabel" (Part 1) is seen as an inseparable characteristic ofthe poem itself, and the poem ends, suggests Cooper, going nowhere in terms of plot, yet journeying toward inexplicable evil, with readers being implored to evaluate their own indeterminant reading practices. In a similar way the narrative of Juan's experiences in Byron's Don Juan becomes consumed by the narrator's digressions; the poem heads toward being "a fluid interchange of realistic contemporary narrative and candid skeptical commentary" (135). The poem places the reader in a world of arbitrary causality, positioned somewhere between hope and despair, skepticism and affirmation, and being called upon to consider the morality ofaction. Cooper suggests that with similar ironic turns Blake's The Marriage ofHeaven and Hell shifts its meaning from the text to the reader's revised idea ofself, and Milton is a "mythological poem that proceeds by annihilating mythology" (74). Tb some this may all sound self-evident. Tbday the literary critic has to live with the knowledge that the "meaning" ofa text is, ironically, both indeterminately ever present in the text and always already in the reader. But Cooper's study clearly locates the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century philosophical context out ofwhich this problematical awareness manifests itself in Romantic poetry. Cooper presents his ideas in a dense way; that is, he compromises neither his critical lexicon nor involved style ofthinking. The...